The selection of only one fast bowler by India ahead of this week’s first Test in Kanpur was a neon-lit hint of what was to come.
Not that hints were needed, of course. Green Park is one of those Test venues on the frontier of respectability, where corporatised cricket still rubs shoulders with old-school skullduggery. The touring South Africans might be young, but none of them would have been naïve enough to think they were going to get anything but a pitch as lazy and spiteful as a puffadder.
And so it was. Anil Kumble trotted in, hour after hour, his loose-limbed leg-spin leaping endlessly at gloves and bat-splices like an incorrigible Jack Russell fixated on a suspended pork-chop.
Harbhajan Singh, the Sundance Kid to Kumble’s Butch Cassidy, flounced and swooned, gaped and groaned, as his off-spin bounced over horizontal bats or squatted under bottom-edges. Murali Kartik filled the footholes of all those left-armers who have beaten South African bats since the Proteas’ first visit to India in 1996; an apparently endless dynasty of cheek-sucking, hair-clutching tweakers.
And nothing happened.
Somehow, despite the direst predictions of qualified pundits and Mail & Guardian cricket writers alike, the dust settled to reveal an honourable stalemate. We’ve got a slightly bloody nose, but you should see the other guy.
Of course the long-term concerns still fester. Makhaya Ntini confirmed once more that he is a strike bowler only when conditions and match circumstances are in his favour. A three-wicket burst isn’t a breakthrough when the opposition are 407/4.
Meanwhile, Jacques Kallis crawled into the realms of self-parody on the final day when, with absolutely nothing to lose and the psychological upper hand still to win, he persisted in his barbiturate pursuit of personal averages, finishing unbeaten on 22. Or 24. Or something. When it’s that painful, who cares?
But these are gripes to save for a time when the national team is going forward again, and not still trying to get up off its knees. And to focus only on the dark clouds hanging over the team would be to overlook the dazzling beam of sunshine that regularly punctured the gloom in the person of Andrew Hall.
His first-innings century, an eloquent reminder of his excellence both as a cricketer and a human being, has drawn deserved praise, and if he does nothing else in his international career, the memory of Sachin Tendulkar’s off and middle stumps going over should nourish him for decades to come. But it was the unquantifiable sense of purpose and controlled aggression that he brought to the game that set him apart from his teammates.
Steaming chest-beaters we’ve had aplenty: from Andre Nel to Nantie Hayward players have come and gone who seemed to be using the game as some sort of therapy. Likewise there’s been no shortage of monomaniacs, wrapped up in a bubble of determination and ambition: the captain and his star allrounder are the prime examples of this.
But not since Jonty Rhodes has a South African Test player seemed as hungry for the team to prosper, as consistently up for anything, as does Hall. Zander de Bruin rode his luck in an admirable debut, but Hall made his luck by sheer force of will.
Herschelle Gibbs suddenly seemed terribly far away and, despite his superior talent and experience, desperately tinny in comparison.
Handing out congratulations for a draw treads dangerously close to the English failure-worship of the late 1990s, but in this case Ray Jennings deserves to take a brisk bow. Promoting Hall and selecting De Bruin demonstrated chutzpah guided by insight, a quality lacked for so long by South African cricketing brass.
Can the tourists draw the second Test and return home moral victors? This week Glenn McGrath — the personification of a rabbit at bat — stroked 62 against New Zealand. Proof, as if we needed it, that in cricket anything is possible.